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Yesterday, I interviewed George W Bush’s former assistant secretary of commerce Bruce Mehlman about the impact of last week’s election on the Obama administration’s technology policy. Today, I spoke to Mehlman’s co-chair at the Internet Innovation Alliance, David Sutphen, a one-time General Council to Senator Ted Kennedy and a prominent Democratic activist both in technology policy and civil rights.

It is no coincidence that Sutphen’s interests span both technology and civil rights. For him, technology policy needs to focus on fostering innovation in order to guarantee the core civil right of all American workers: jobs. From prospective network neutrality legislation to guaranteeing protection against intellectual piracy to broadband policy, Sutphen argues that Obama needs to find common ground with business and identify core policy areas where successful technological innovation can once again drive the general prosperity of the American economy.